Innovation in Tea: Watch These Spaces

February 10, 2018

The Innovation Imperative: Where and How, not If In a time of change, the question is not whether to innovate, but how. For tea, it’s also urgent. There are challenges to business as usual everywhere: sustainable development, shifting consumer tastes and demographics, coffee competition, yields, costs, and quality, to name just the obvious. The good news is that if "Necessity is the Mother of Invention," mom’s been getting the kids up early and pushing them hard to do their homework and get

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Peter Keen

Peter has been a senior professor at leading business and technology universities across the world, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Oxford. He is the author of over forty books and a noted international consultant and public speaker. Tea writing and education are his avocation, with a focus on helping tea lovers find the ones that fit their personal tastes at best value. He has a strong interest in the offbeat stories and social and cultural aspects of tea history. His latest book is Tea Tips.

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2 Comments

Jem McDowall
on February 12, 2018 at 3:05 pm •Reply

Surprised not to see more emphasis on inventory levels (all the way through to consumer cupboards). Why for instance should there be 2-3 year shelf-lives when “freshness” is actually a selling point? Why would selling on Buy-One-Get-One-Free basis help with a freshness platform or shelf-life velocity? (BOGOF just slows down the re-purchase. It doesn’t make the consumer drink more – AND it means the consumers final “product memory” before re-purchase is that of a stale product).
Do/can retailers and packers work closer to JIT? Granted if you have seasonal products (eg Darjeeling) or half-seasonal dependent products (Argentina/Malawi) 12/6+ month supply chains might be appropriate but the reality is at LEAST 2-3x that if not more. Someone is paying for all the financing and storage….. These inventory lead-times are not supply chain complexity issues (tea only takes 6-8 weeks to destination these days) they are procurement/production/sales planning issues at the consumer market end.

A fresher, faster-moving product would benefit everyone in the industry. Let’s focus on product quality as well as costs.
Matthew London
on March 7, 2018 at 9:01 pm •Reply

Peter,
Another fascinating article.
Two small corrections:

The genome of Camellia sinensis is 3Gb, not 4Gb (https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S167420521730103X)

And the largest plant genome is Paris japonica, at 149Gb, it is about 50 times larger than Camellia sinensis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_japonica